Prof. Efraim Karsh, the incoming director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, skewers the Oslo diplomatic process as “the starkest strategic blunder in Israel’s history” and as “one of the worst calamities ever to have afflicted Israelis and Palestinians.”
“Twenty three years after its euphoric launch on the White House lawn,” Karsh writes in this comprehensive study, “the Oslo ‘peace process’ has substantially worsened the position of both parties and made the prospects for peace and reconciliation ever more remote.”
“The process has led to establishment of an ineradicable terror entity on Israel’s doorstep, deepened Israel’s internal cleavages, destabilized its political system, and weakened its international standing.”
“It has been a disaster for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians too. It has brought about subjugation to corrupt and repressive PLO and Hamas regimes. These regimes have reversed the hesitant advent of civil society in these territories, shattered their socioeconomic wellbeing, and made the prospects for peace and reconciliation with Israel ever more remote.”
“This abject failure is a direct result of the Palestinian leadership’s perception of the process as a pathway not to a two-state solution – meaning Israel alongside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza – but to the subversion of the State of Israel. They view Oslo not as a path to nation-building and state creation, but to the formation of a repressive terror entity that perpetuates conflict with Israel, while keeping its hapless constituents in constant and bewildered awe as Palestinian leaders line their pockets from the proceeds of this misery.”
Karsh details at length how the Oslo process has weakened Israel’s national security in several key respects.
On the strategic and military levels, it allowed the PLO to achieve in one fell swoop its strategic vision of transforming the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into terror hotbeds that would disrupt Israel’s way of life (to use Yasser Arafat’s words).
“Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder,
is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they
call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes
a wreck.” —Thomas Jefferson, to James Smith, December 8, 1822
You ask yourself: Why do the “gullible” make it so easy to mock and ridicule them? But, then, one could spend a career wondering about the cerebral workings of our politicians and other notables. Why is a stone so quiet, and inanimate? Because that’s just the way it behaves, or doesn’t behave. Here is a selection of memorable gaffes (or lies masquerading as innocent gaffes or lapses in synaptic activity).
We start with our reality-challenged, addled Secretary of State, John Kerry, who recently uttered something in Bangladesh that wins some kind of award for upper class twitism. According to CNS new and other sources, he opined:
Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday during an appearance in Bangladesh that the media could “do us all a service” if they didn’t cover terrorism “quite as much.”
What would he prefer the MSM to cover, instead of the continued spate of Islamic terrorism? It isn’t as though it regularly reported the rapes by Muslims in Germany and Sweden, or the numerous honor killings in Muslim countries, or the number of gays thrown off of roofs in ISIS territory. Perhaps the annual pie-eating contest in Indianapolis? The annual Iditarod race in Alaska? How about the horrendous murder rates in “gun-controlled” Chicago? Nix the latter. It would be too much like reporting on Syria.
No country is immune from terrorism,” Kerry said at a press conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “It’s easy to terrorize. Government and law enforcement have to be correct 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But if you decide one day you’re going to be a terrorist and you’re willing to kill yourself, you can go out and kill some people. You can make some noise. Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much. People wouldn’t know what’s going on.”
And that’s okay with Kerry. “Ignorance is Strength,” don’t you know? What the people don’t know won’t hurt them, until the next terrorist attack hurts them by the score. This piece of mental gibberish is in line with the German-Swedish policy of suppressing any news that would tend to make native Europeans less enthralled with how consistently and ubiquitously savage their new “refugee” neighbors” are. As the National Review’s Jim Geragehty noted on August 30th,
You can’t write satire about this administration anymore; it’s become too inherently contradictory and absurd.
Not even Saturday Night Live could make up this kind of statement for laughs. It’s too bad Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist, isn’t around to create a John Kerry dummy.
President Obama took office in 2009 promising that his brand of engagement would yield global respect for the United States. We’ve since had more than seven years of leading from behind, standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the “international community,” snubbing of allies, appeasing of enemies and cutting America down to size. As Obama makes what will likely be his final official visit to China, how’s it going?
Well, China, as host of the current G-20 summit, rolled out the red carpet — or at least the red-carpeted airplane stairs — for the arriving leaders of such countries as Britain, Australia, Germany and Russia.
For President Obama, arriving yesterday on Air Force One, there was no such dignified reception. Instead, there was a shoving match with the press and a confrontation with National Security Adviser Susan Rice, in which a Chinese official shouted “This is our country. This is our airport.” For lack of any portable stairs rolled to the front door of the presidential plane, Obama was left to jog down the aircraft’s own stairs at the back.
Obama downplayed the insult, telling reporters “not to over-crank the significance.”
Maybe that makes sense in the bubble-world of the Ben-Rhodes-foreign-policy narrative, where the tide of war is forever receding, the arc of history bends toward justice, the oceans rise and fall at the command of Obama’s pen and phone, and the echo chamber, on cue, applauds.
But China’s reception was an insult, pure and simple. No one need study the tea leaves to understand that this was a gesture of gross disrespect, seen around the world, putting the American president in his place — especially as compared with the warm reception for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
